Ika Musume and Goldbach's Conjecture
by Charles V. Priest
Summary: Placed after the events of episode 6. Ika is asked to help Eiko study for her Math's test. After getting tired of Ika constantly mocking her , Eiko decides to play a little prank on the squid girl: She will hand her an unsolvable problem...
1. Won't you solve it?

"How can't you get this geso~? Its very easy geso~. If its positive on this side, its becomes negative on the other. If its multiplying, it goes dividing after it crosses to the other side the two lines. Its right there in the instructions, how can't you understand it geso~? "Ika said."I just cant! This just doesn't make sense!" shouted Eiko. "I don't get it! I don't get it at all!" She said as she took her hands to her head and screamed in frustration "Enough! Enough of this! Is useless! Everything is useless! I will never learn it!"

"Hmpf" said Ika while standing up. "If all humans are really this stupid, taking over will be easier than I though, Hu Hu." She looked down to Eiko, with her arms crossed and a smile filled with contempt.

"Who are you calling stupid you damn squid head!" Eiko shouted as she jumped to grab Ika through the neck of her shirt and lift her into the air while shaking her strenuously.  
"Geso Geso!" babbled Ika, who looked as if she were going to die from the choking.

"Oh my, Oh my Eiko" said Chizuru as she entered. "I see you are having a lot of fun over here, but not everything can be play and games, you know? After all, your exam is tomorrow, isn't it little sis?" As soon as she said this, her eyes where covered by shadows and her usual smile became wider and scarier. Shaking with fear, Eiko let Ika go and placed her hands in her back, while saying: "Su-sure si-sister. We were just pla-playing, ri-right Ika? She looked towards Ika, but she had already passed out.

"Geeesooooo~" she said while it seemed her spirit was about to leave her body.

After Chizuru left, they resumed the lessons, with Ika explaining the procedure and Eiko still being incapable to understand them. It went on until Ika taught her about the basics of the inequalities and left her to perform the exercises by her own.

"So, keep doing this, until you get to something you can't solve. Try to do it at least ten minutes before asking me, and if you can't solve it by then I will tell you how to do it. I'm going to sleep there now, so wake me up when you need me geso~."

"But that's my bed!" Eiko shouted, but Ika didn't listen and lied down anyway.

"That damn squid!" Eiko mumbled, but she kept working. From time to time however, she could hear Ika talking in her sleep:

"I can't eat anymore geso~"

Then, after the eighth time Ika babbled in her dreams out loud, a mischievous idea came to her mind. She will make her pay for mocking her. She will make Ika feel as stupid as she  
felt solving those dammed problems. So, she turned on her computer and browsed a few web pages for some minutes and, while checking that Ika was still sleeping, she wrote down a few words on a piece of paper. The she turned it off, and silently walked to her sitting spot, and lied there for a minute or two. Then she shouted at the top of her lounges "God, I cant do this!" which in turn, waked Ika up, just as she planned. While rubbing her hands to her eyes, the squid girl said while yawning :

"Whats the matter geeesooo~."

"This problem... its impossible! answered Eiko. "Did you tried for as long as I said, geso~?" said Ika as she walked from the bed and got closer to the table. "Yes, I did!" said Eiko "I tried and I tried and... nothing!" She took her hands to her face, pretending to cry.

"Let me see it then geso~" Ika said. Eiko handed out the sheet with the problem in it. Ika read it out loud "_Prove that every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes_"

"Hmm... Hmm " she mumbled, and stood still for a while."I don't get it" she finally said.

"Ha! I knew it!" thought Eiko "Now she will finally drop the whole act".

"I don't get it" Ika repeated "whats an integer? whats a prime? whats express geso~?"

"Eh?" Eiko shouted. "Well, this problem doesn't have the definitions like the others geso~. I used to see what everything means in the part before the exercises and then follow the instructions, but this one doesn't say what these things represent, and it doesn't give any directions at all. Where did you got this, geso~?"

"Eh.. it was a homework..."Eiko said "So you know what do this things mean?" quickly answered Ika.

"Ah.. yeah, I suppose" Eiko answered.

"Teach me! "Ika shouted, her eyes sparkling.

"Hmm.. well... A integer is a number like 1, 2 or 3. Whole numbers, with out parts.. I think." Eiko mumbled. "Normal numbers then? "Ika said.  
"Yeah, I suppose. An even integer is a number that can be divided by two, like 4, 8 and 16.."

"Ok then! Now, whats a prime?" Ika asked.

Well... a prime is a number that cant be divided by any number that is not itself or one with out leaving a reminder, like 7 or 11. Six , for example, isn't a prime because.. eh.. it can be divided by 2 or 3, So...

"Oh! I get it" Ika interrupted "just like 3 or 1847 or 2447 or 7177..." Ok, Ok you got it" Eiko said, terrified of how easily she could come up with them."And express just means to represent... eh... like saying they are the same thing or something so, it goes more or less like this: 4 is equal to 2+2, two primes, and 6 is 3+3, two primes again, and 12 is 5+7 and..."

"168 is 97+ 71!" Ika shouted excitedly "Yes, exactly" Eiko answered.

"So the problem just says that I have to show that every normal number that can be split in two is the sum of two numbers that cant be divided, right?" said Ika.

"Yeah, I think thats more or less what it says..." "Doesn't sound that hard!" Ika shouted. "Yes, of course, its very easy, the teacher and my friends in school said so!" Eiko lied.

"Well" Ika said. "Where are the instructions?" "Ehh... well... I think there were none." Eiko said. "The teacher said we could solve it with just that..."

"Oh well, I will just try the instructions from the other problems until I figure out which one works." Ika said.

"Hmph...Hmph..." She sat down, took some blank pages, grabbed a pencil and started writing on them at an incredible speed. Eiko stood there, in shock, as Ika dashed through the paper sheets, filling them with her weird symbols and her strange notations.

There she stood while the minutes became hours, until at some point, Ika said "This is taking to long" and she stood up and walked away. When Eiko recovered from her shock, she ran after where she had gone , only to find Ika at the beach, using everyone of the tentacles of her hair to write in the sand, so quickly she could barely see them move and, each of them moved aggressively, as if piercing the sand with a murderous fury and hate while leaving behind strange symbols and enigmatic forms imprinted after each and everyone of their moves. She stood there, writing in the sand, until the night became day and eventually the whole beach became filled by those figures.

But even then, Ika still didn't look satisfied.

When Chizuru appeared in the morning to open the store, she found Ika lying in front of her drawings, now not writing, but just contemplating them, thinking. She found Eiko too, but just standing still, looking at Ika and her mysterious work. She seemed to had been awake all night, just watching her every move as she drew those symbols in the sand, thinking that Ika might have been possessed by an angry spirit who hated the way the world looked and decide to improve it adding her own designs to it. Now that design covered the beach, and what was then a blank slate of sand lied fill of complex figures and patters, more as a piece of modern art than something made by nature or by god.

"Oh my!" Chizuru said. "What fun game have you came up with now, girls? Also Eiko, did you forgot about your test?" Eiko snapped." Oh my god! I am going to be late for school!" She dashed back to the house, but not without looking one last time to the beach, where the squid girl still stood, frozen, looking at her own creation, with the same distant look she would had if she were looking at the horizon.

"Oh well!" Chizuru thought. "So Ika, would you tell me what where you and Eiko playing around here all night?"

"Well" Ika said, with out the frighten voice that usually accompanied her while addressing Chizuru "Eiko had a math problem and I couldn't solve it geso~. I been here all night thinking about it, and I couldn't do it, at least, not yet..."

"And what would that problem be?" asked Chizuru. "Well, its just proving that every even number can be wrote as the sum of two primes" Ika said bluntly.  
"Hmm... haha well, I cant solve it either" said Chizuru while laughing. Ika eyes sparkled "A problem even Chizuru cant solve!" she thought. "Now is my opportunity to finally rule above this puny humans, He He. If I solve this problem, then I would prove myself smarter than everyone in this shop, and then they will finally kneel to me and surrender! Ha Ha!" The image of humanity bending to her will keep running through her head.

But then she remembered the time where she tried to impress Goro with her math skills, and he only stepped over her equations as he ignored her, or when she tried to show them to Nagisa, and she only responded with "well, math isn't used in everyday life" and walked away.

"Maybe math isn't that important to humans" she thought.

Well, even if it wouldn't let it to conquer humanity, she would keep doing it, since she was having fun. It was as just as fun as swimming in the sea against a strong current, or  
as eating more shrimps that she could handle. It was the fun of a challenge, and it was the most fun thing she had done on a while.

She walked once again to the sea, and resumed with her sketches in the sand.


	2. Won't you learn it?

A week passed and Ika still hadn't solved the problem. The first three days she worked with out stopping until she collapsed by the lack of sleep and hunger.

After she was dragged back to the house and rested, she promised she would take breaks to eat and sleep. Yet she only did so briefly, and when spoken, she always acted as if her mind where somewhere else, distant. She only could think of going back to the beach, of her sketches, and of the numbers.

This kept going until Cindy came to visit.

"Oh Ms. Alien! What is this? Are this the signals used to invite a UFO landing?"

"No" Ika responded briefly. "Its a math problem"

"Oh really! How alien like of you! Wont you tell me about it? I know some things about that. Maybe I can help?"

Ika remembered the first time she showed to her some complex math, and recalled that she could understand them well, so she stopped writing, told her about the problem and explained all the things she tried ,while C listened patiently.

"And here, you see, I used squidarithms geso~... and here I use it as exponent for the Squid number geso~... and there I applied the Ika-Musume theorem..." Ika kept saying, only to be interrupted by Cindy short corrections:

"I think those are called logarithms... and that number is called Euler's number... and that theorem is called The Hardy-Ramanujan Theorem" until at one point, finally, Ika finally snapped:

"Are you saying everything I have done here some human has done it before?"she shouted "Well... yes. Humans have been working in this problem of yours for long, they have tried most of the things that you have tried here, and a lot else. But its impressive that you could had deduced up all of this by yourself..."

"Really?" Ika said surprised "But Eiko said it was an easy problem. I thought I was inventing some new, complicated way to do it"

Cindy remained silent for a second, and her face, for an instant, looked as it were slightly filled with grief, but that look disappeared as soon as it came, and she just answered "I think she lied to trick you; no one has ever been able to solve this problem, and some had even spent their whole lives trying to do so. So, as far as I know, no human could solve this, even less if that human is just a girl learning about math" Cindy said and then suddenly, her face became happier, as if the sorrow that filled it previously had disappeared once and for all.

" But as a matter of fact... all aliens should!"

"Eh?" said Ika.

"So aren't you just a... stupid alien?" Cindy asked.

"EEEEEEEEEHHHHH!" shouted Ika.

"Well, if aliens have faster-than-light spaceships and time travel, they should be able to solve this. Its a good way to determine whether some one who claims to speak with aliens is saying the truth or just making stuff up. You just ask him if his aliens have sufficient advanced math and, if they yes, you send them this problem, begging him to show it to the aliens so they will provide you with a solution. They will never write back..."

"Hmm Hmm" Ika said.

"But that's why I was so happy when I finally found you Ika! I have been all my live going from disappoint to disappoint, looking for proofs of contact and only finding fakes, liars and frauds. But you, with your tentacles and squid powers, are such an obvious alien it doesn't matter if you are too stupid to solve this! You are my little dumb space traveler!" Cindy said.

"I keep telling I'm not an alien! I-I mean I'm not stupid! I will show you! I will solve this!" Ika shouted.

"Great! then there will be even more proof that you are an alien!" Cindy said happily.

"Geez geso~!" Said Ika, and she walked away, trying to find a place she hadn't wrote in before so she could resume her work.

Ika kept working in the sand for a couple more of days, ignoring the invitations of Takeru to play or the constant annoyances of Sanae, who kept pursuing her to solve "the problem of her heart" , until Cindy visited again.

"What do you want geso~? Came here to mock me again geso~?" Ika said, looking angry.

"No, no" Cindy said. "I came here because I brought you a present!"

"Really?" Ika said "Is it shrimp geso~?"  
"No, sorry" Cindy said. "But it will help you with your problem"

She whistled, and immediately, a truck full of books loaded its charge upon her. "Whats the meaning of this geso~?" Ika shouted as she trying to scape from the avalanche. "This are math books" Cindy said. "Some of them contain a lot of what other people have done about your problem, so you maybe save yourself some work if you give them a look..."

"Oh" Ika said "So the instructions are there?"

"Instructions?" Cindy asked "What do you mean?" "

Well, in all the other math problems they teach it you how to do it. They said something like: Using Newton Squidnominal, calculate this and that. And then you went back to see what Newton Squidnomsomething was, and you found out exactly how to do it. That why it was so easy. But Eiko didn't gave me the instructions for this one at all and there was no book to read them from!

"Well" Cindy responded "the reason those have instructions is because we already know how to do them. No one can teach you what tools to use to solve a problem nobody else have solved but, at least, this books will tell you what doesn't work. The work of this men who wrote them, the Mathematicians, is like that of the Explorers . They try to go where no one else have been, trying to know what no one else knows. They say that only when you are creating something new, when you have done something nobody else have done before, and only then, you are doing mathematics"

"I see geso~" Ika responded. "Weird hobby geso~"

"And, who knows, maybe some day you can invent the way to solve it, and you will be the one writing the instructions to solve it!"

"Hmm" said Ika. She came closer to the books, and she opened the first one. "_Theo-dor-__Spie-ker__: __Lehr-buch-__de-r__e-be-nen-__Geo-me-trie_" She read on its cover.  
"What? I cant understand any of this!" Ika shouted. "That's because its in German". Cindy responded.

"But I can't read German!" Ika protested.

Well, Cindy said, since you learned Japanese so quickly, I thought you would have no problem with learning another language just as fast. "Hmpf" Ika mumbled. "Very well, geso! I will learn your "Gesorman" geso~."

Slowly she took all the books she could back to the restaurant, 7 or 8 at the time, until she had taken all of them inside. Then she sat down, and read.

But all the time, at the distance, Eiko was watching. She had been doing so since the very beginning, with all her thoughts coming crawling back to the prank she did to Ika, and every time that happened she felt as if she were being slowly stabbed in her heart.

But she didn't told Ika, nor anyone else. She only stood there, and watched.

The days passed by as Ika read through the sea of books. There she found not only works about prime numbers, but also about every other branch of human science, and in almost every human language. She leaned them all. She even learned a little of history, through the remarks about the ages and times when the theories were made, and she also learned a lot about mankind's mind and its spirit by reading about the biographies of those who worked on them.

She even teared a little when she read some parts, like when she read for the first time about Archimedes death. "A man who would rather die than to stop working. What a compromise to this thing." She thought.

She also though that him shouting to the Roman solider to "_Don't disturb his circles_", referring to his works written in the sand (that supposedly were be the predecessors of modern calculus) , right before he was stabbed by the insulted Roman, mirrored the time when she tried to teach Goro and he only stepped over her own work on the beach.

"Maybe there is a tradition on the human society, that those who doesn't understand math will often trample the work of those who do".

She laughed when she read about the Bernulli brothers, how they would steal solutions to each other, and how their father would kick any of his sons out of the house if any of them would dare to surpass him . She got furious when she read about the injustices committed to Carnot and Turing, and blushed when he read the adventures that Feynman got in while he was doing Physics in a stripper bar.

She also slowly realized that it was not like Nagisa said, but the other way around. Math was not only used in everyday life, but rather, it was the source of all human power and knowledge.

It was math the one who gave them the tools to do Physics, which in term they used to control nature. She read that also, the human world was dependent on this products of Physics (or Technology as they called them) even if very few of them knew anything about it. She understood why her invasion was doomed to fail: Her species failed to produce such wonderful products or to care about nature and its laws, and failed to record their own discoveries the few times they did.

But she would set that right, she thought. Once she solved that problem, she would go back to the sea. She would then teach to its inhabitants what she learned here. She would teach them math, and then everything will change. Yes, everything would change, once she solved this problem. Yes, everything...

A time came when she had read almost every book she had. She changed the way she looked at herself after identifying with a young man from India, and in his works she found the help that she sometimes needed to by pass another obstacle in her way to solve her problem. This young man seemed to had, just like her, discovered almost all the math known just from one book while living in a wooden shack, and like her, was terrible disappointed when he realized most that what he did had been done before.

She also changed her views on math after reading the history of another man who worked extensively on the concept of infinitude. This man had thought that the god that made the earth and everything in it could be represented only by the number infinite, and that by understanding it, he would understand God. "Not a bad idea" Ika thought. She realized that, if she saw it like the old man did, math was not the servant of men, but the other way around: It was men who served math, and that math would give them little treats for time to time, but that was not why they worked for it, no. They did so because it was their religion, it was their answer to the meaning of life.

"See" she thought "Mathematics is perfect, Mathematics is eternal, so if God is perfect and eternal, then math must be the closest thing to God".  
"So this people, the Mathematicians, are really the humans true priests: those who truly talk to God, not through prayers and chants, but through numbers and equations."

She recalled her experience working in her problem, and realized why some humans, at least, those who really understood what math really meant, would pursue it even till it take them to their deaths, and she was glad to learn there were at least some of them so committed to this poetry of numbers that they were willing to live and to die for it. This were not the men destroying her sea, or their own earth. No, those who did that knew little of numbers or God and lived like Nagisa, thinking that math had nothing to do with them when it really was both the source of their power and their reason to use it.

No, this men had no time to waste in such pointless activities. This men only cared about serving their God.

But then, the tragedy struck. The last book she read had a strange title: "_Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I_", it was a lot thinner than the rest, and its author had a strange name, that resounded somewhere in her mind but she couldn't recall where, only that, by some reason, she associated it with death itself.

The name was Kurt Godel.

She passed through the pages. It was a work, as far she understood it, on whether every problem on math could be solved. She remembered the words of another mathematician, who said that "_The true reason why no one has succeeded in finding an unsolvable problem is, in my opinion, that there is no unsolvable problem. In contrast to the foolish Ignoramibus, our credo avers: We must know. We shall know!_"

She didn't knew what a Ignoramibus was, but she like the way that last phrase sounded "We must know, we shall know!" she thought as she read.

But, in fact, the words on that last book she was reading said otherwise. It said that math wasn't perfect, since it wasn't "infinitely axiomatizable", which she sort of understood as meaning that all the rules of math couldn't be written down someday and that then every one of its results could be deduced from them.

"No, some times in math" said the more or less the man in the book "if you believe in certain things, you end proving that something that is wrong is right, and if you forgo those things, you end being unable to prove that something that is right really is."

So, as Ika discovered, math wasn't perfect, math wasn't god, but a only a game of the human mind in which there could be problems that could never be solved, and that there was no way to know before hand which problems could be solved and which couldn't.

Now she remembered why she feared the name of Godel. She read a bit about him when she read about the life of Turing, but the parts about him where gone, as if someone tried to erase them before, as if someone if didn't want her to read about until the time was right.

The only thing that could be seen in the little that remained still readable, was the nickname of Godel: _" The Father of Logic, __the __man __who __murdered__ Mathematics__." _

So, thanks to him, no longer Mathematicians could pretend they were God's servants, or that knowing anything about it would get them closer to the greatest of truths. Math was just a game. and they were only gamblers waisting their lives in a lost cause, not different from a drunk man believing he could find redemption on his bottle, nor better than the young school girl who thought math worthless and decided to had nothing to do with it.

Their God had abandoned them. Their God was dead. And it was them who killed him.

Ika looked at the sea, the looked to the beach, and realized that, even now, she still feel the urge to pierce its sands, and to start working on her problem once again. Even as hopelessness invaded her, as thoughts of despair came, the urge was too great. She had to keep going. She had to do it. Even if... there was no hope.

"Even if there is no way, I will make it on my own" She said, and once again, she walked to the beach. She would never read a Math's book again.

And all that time, Eiko kept looking at her from the distance. Looking, in silence.


	3. Won't you stop it?

Ika kept drawing in the sand, but now not with the usual her smile, but with a melancholic, distant look. It was as if her soul was taken away from her and only left behind an empty husk, who had only one desire: to write in the sand, to profane its purity and to make it her own.

And all the time, Eiko watched. Eiko always watched. She watched her for the days and nights that followed. She watched Ika collapse, once and again. She watched her as she nursed her while she was sleeping, and watched how after every collapse, she would only wake up to get back to the beach, even if her legs couldn't support her own weight, even if her hands didn't have even the strength to let her crawl back to it.  
She watched how, when she had recovered enough, she would fight everyone to let her go back, even when all of them joined forces tried to stop her from doing so. She stood there, watching, with feeling unbearable guilt and pain, even if she wasn't sure why.

Until one day, after Cindy paid her usual visit to the chamber where Ika lied unconscious, she took her out of the room and asked her:

"So, is this going according to your plan?" Cindy asked.

"What plan?" Eiko asked.

"Your plan to kill Ika, of course." Cindy answered

"What? I never intended to..."

"Really, then what where you thinking when you gave her that unsolvable problem?" Cindy interrupted.

"I just..." said Eiko in the verge of tears "I just wanted her to stop.. to stop..."

"Being better than you?" Cindy asked

"No! no! well..." Eiko shouted "Maybe... but I didn't want things to turn like this. I didn't want to..."

"Yes , you did, in a way." Cindy said "You were set up to kill her spirit, to kill her will, but only now you realized that doing such a thing would kill her body first."

Eiko stood there, listening to Cindy accusations, shaking, crying.

"No... No!" she said. "No..."

"...But don't worry, she will break, she will threaten your self worth and your fragile ego no longer, just as you wanted, since she will die, and her strength and pride will go with her to the grave." Cindy said.

"NO! I didn't want to kill her! It was just a prank! A game! A..."

"You tried to crush her spirit, you were trying to destroy her confidence. Isn't that far worse than to kill a man, to kill its soul? To make her bend, to crush her expectations, to force mediocrity into her, so she wouldn't rise above you? Wasn't it just..."

"No, I never wanted that!" Eiko interrupted "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

"Do you know the story of how Mozart died? It is said that Salieri, a rival composer, was jealous of his genius, and pushed Mozart towards his end by forcing him to compose a Requiem while he was ill, knowing, in a way, Mozart would exhaust himself death trying to finish that piece and he wouldn't be able to save any strength to fight back the disease, so in the end he would, unconsciously, write that requiem for himself and die afterwards, so his own death hymn would be finally fitting for its author."

After hearing this, Eiko fell into her knees, her hands on her face, sobbing endlessly "Stop! Stop!" She shouted, but Cindy wasn't moved by her tears, and resumed her speech.

"When you gave her that problem, weren't you trying to do the same thing? You knew it wasn't normal for squid could live out side the ocean, and that, surely, she had to do some effort to maintain herself stable while she was here. Didn't you gave her this problem because you knew it will ask everything out of her, and would kill her in the end?

Didn't you did this because you were like Salieri? Because you were just jealous of her? Because her genius was an insult to you, a mediocre, a worthless human without passions and that wouldn't bother find one? Wasn't her talent an insult to your kind, who look down on others but have no reason to do so, and their only chance to remain happy is to hide themselves from the truth, from the beautiful, from the genius, and live in a world pretending the grapes were sour all along?" Cindy asked

"No, I'm not like that! I swear! I didn't want this!" she said while crying. "Please make her stop! please save Ika!" Eiko begged.

"I can't, no one can." Cindy responded. "Its said that obsessions define man. Once they are possessed by one, people say, they become an instrument of that obsession and of that obsession only, they become its tool, and they do nothing or think of nothing, besides that what it desires they to do or think. I guess the same is for all sentient creatures..."

"But you encouraged her! You gave her all those books!" cried Eiko.

"Yes, I did. But I only did it because I was hoping that would stop her from going on. I was hoping that she would see how much effort did it take, how many lives where lost pursuing those impossible problems, and slowed down..."

She paused for a second, as if she were about to restrain herself from crying . But if that was so, her face didn't say it. She keep talking, as nothing happened.

"And if that failed, I was hoping that when the time came, she would fully understand what Godel work really meant and realize everything might be a just hopeless effort that would accomplish nothing. But I failed. Even facing the possibility that everything would be meaningless, that every bit of what she worked for might be a lost cause, she kept going, undiscouraged. Once a obsession has you in such a tight grip, there is no longer a way to scape."

"So, are you saying there no way to save her?" Eiko cried.

"Well, maybe you can convince her to stop it and to go back to the ocean. But its unlikely that she would listen to you at all"

"I will try. I have to try!" Eiko shouted, as she ran away.

She spent the next days besides Ika, begging her to go back, and each and every time she rejected her, and once she felt strong enough, she walked again to the beach, ignoring Eiko pleads to stop.

One time she ran to were Ika was drawing, hugged her and cried, begging her to go back to the sea, but her only response was:

"Don't disturb my lines!".

That's how it was until after one of her collapses couldn't stand up again, and even after a full week of rest she still wasn't able to move. Even then, Ika kept begging to be brought to the beach, but her request was denied.

"Please return to the Ocean Ika." Eiko begged once again.

"I can't, because I wont be able to write it there". Ika answered while coughing. "The writings on the underwater sand never last, and I can't use ink to write down my thoughts there" She said while coughing once again. "What would happen if I got the answer, and then forget? No, no I need to stay here. I.. need... to write."

"Then I will write it down for you" Eiko said "But please, don't try to stand up. Please Ika"

"Ok geso~.. "cough"... I will tell you and you will write..."

"Yes, I will, so please, please stay there, and rest. I will do everything for you. So please, stay."

"Thanks Eiko" Ika said. "You have always been there for me. Thanks to you I was able to learn about this wonderful things. Thanks to you, I know math. Thanks to you, I finally understand humanity. Thanks to you, I found meaning in all of this. Thanks to you, I finally know..."

"Don't say that! Please, don't say you thank me after what I done to you! I don't deserve it, I didn't want this! I.. I .." but Eiko broke into tears before she could finish that phrase. She was unable to look at Ika, and she kept there sitting besides her, looking at the ground. She felt a hand in her cheek, moving softly, as if with her touch it where telling that everything was going to be fine, telling her to let her sorrow go and then, suffer no more. Then she felt that same hand falling into her lap; Ika had fallen sleep once again. Eiko grabbed then the hand that lied now besides her, and began to cry.

The next week, Eiko spent it sitting in front of Ika's bed, writing everything she said while she was awake and looking at her while she was asleep. Day by day, once blank pages turned into an ocean of figures of ink, just as once the empty beach became art under Ika's desire. She tried to make her stop, but realized her condition would only became worse when she refused to keep going. "she must be going about it in her head every time I refuse to keep writing" she thought, and realized the mental effort was slightly alleviated if she kept copying, so she did. But that only gave her a little more of time, and it seemed she had very few left.

She remembered about the two Mathematicians Ika talked most about when she was healthier. One of them, the young poor genius from India, Ramanujan, died in a hospital when he was 32 after a suicide attempt.

The other one, George Cantor, died poor and alone after he was sent to a psychiatric institution. They said the origin of his madness came from trying to understand something mankind wasn't ever supposed comprehend: the infinite, the eternal, the supreme.  
Soon, she thought, they will have to add another name to the list of those destroyed by that knowledge, even if this one didn't belong to a human at all.

This routine when on for a few more days until in one of them, Ika finally said:

"I got it, I got answer! it looks so simple now. Everything looks so easy now..."

"Great, now you can go back and..." Eiko said while crying.

"NO!" Ika shouted "write it down first... I don't want to forget it."

"Ok, but after that you will go back to the sea, and you will recover and... you will come back here...and we will play again..." Eiko said, as she was forcing herself to smile, but with tears running through her eyes

"Yes... Ika said. I will come back, and work in the store... and see everyone again... and we will eat lots of shrimp geso~... hehe"

"Yes, yes you will! Now tell me" Eiko said. " Please tell me"

Ika started dictating slowly, and Eiko copied everything trying to contain her tears. Some times they would soak the paper and with great effort she would force herself to stop so they wont spread the ink on what she had already written. She did so, until Ika finally pronounced :

"That's it, I can rest now."

"Yes, you can rest" Eiko said. Everything will be fine, rest, rest now..."

"Thanks, and... goodbye, Eiko. I'm glad I came here, I glad I meet you. I was so happy I was..."

But she didn't finish that phrase, and she never would, for at that moment, the daughter of the sea was already dead. Only one last impulse reminded on her, the impulse to say one last goodbye and once she did, she was gone.

Eiko finally looked down to what she wrote. After all that time, it would be the first time to notice it, for while Ika was alive, her attention reminded on her, and only on her. She was surprised when she saw there were only incoherent lines, like the ones Ika gave her the first time when she asked her how could she do math like she did.

But, she was sure that this contained the answer, that that would let Ika be known as the greatest mathematician that ever lived, human... or else. But she couldn't understand it. No one could . The secret of the Golbach's Conjecture would lie with her for the eternity.

Now, Eiko grief finally turned to insanity. She cursed herself, she cursed the world.

"She killed a genius. She killed a saint. She killed a god" She thought.

"And why? because of her jealousy, because of her envy, because of her rage. She was now the protector of the mediocre, of the unworthy, of the untalented. She too, was Salieri."

"I killed you Ika! I killed you!"

She shouted.

"I killed you..."

"I killed...

...you"

...

..

.

"...And that's why you shouldn't let Ika tutor you, and make her come to my house everyday instead" Sanae said.

"That story doesn't even make sense... and isn't it just a excuse to make me look bad?" said Eiko.

"No, that's what always happens! Math kills people! I read so... in a book!" cried Sanae.

"Somehow, I find it hard to believe. Also, are you sure that's what happened to Mozart?" asked Eiko.

"That's how it was! A saw it in a movie about him yesterday... and I swear it will happen again if she keeps teaching you!" Sanae answered.

Eiko brought her palm to her forehead. " Why do I even bother to talk to you? I have work to do." She said while leaving.

"Hmpf" Sanae mumbled, as she went on to think on her next plan to get Ika for her, once and for all.

_The End_


End file.
